“They’ve been known to catch my attention.”
“Mine won’t. Now my hips are a different matter. They’re huge.”
“Your hips are not huge.”
“I look like a pear.”
“You do not look like a pear.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence, but since you haven’t seen me naked, you’re not exactly a competent judge.”
“We can take care of that right now.”
He was at his most enticing: gray eyes glinting, that unexpected dimple on display just beneath his cheekbone, funny, warm, sexy. And she was at her most vulnerable. In a flash of insight that nearly knocked her from her feet, she realized that she was in love with him. Deeply and forever in love. She loved his masculinity, his intelligence, his complexity. She loved his sense of humor and his loyalty to his family, as well as that old-fashioned moral code that dictated he watch out for a child. Even one he didn’t want.
There was no time to think about it, no place to run so she could ponder the enormity of what had happened. She watched him lift his arm and trace the curve of her jaw with his thumb. “I like you, Rosebud. I like you a lot.”
“You do?”
He nodded.
She noted that he’d said he liked her, not loved her, and swallowed the lump in her throat. “You’re just saying that to get me naked.”
The creases of amusement deepened at the corners of his eyes. “It’s tempting, but this is too important to lie about.”
“I thought you hated me.”
“I did. But it’s hard to hold on to a good—and entirely justifiable—hatred with you.”
Hope sprang inside her. “You forgive me?”
He hesitated. “Not exactly. It’s a pretty big thing to forgive.”
Once again, she felt a great wave of guilt sweeping through her. “You know I’m sorry, don’t you?”
“Are you?”
“I—I can’t be sorry about the baby, but I am sorry about the way I used you. I didn’t think of you as a real person, just a dehumanized object that could give me what I wanted. If anyone treated me that way, I’d never forgive them, and if it’s any consolation, you should know that I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Maybe you could do what I’ve been doing and work on separating the sin from the sinner.”
She gazed into his eyes, trying to see through them to his heart. “Do you really not hate me anymore?”
“I already told you that I like you.”
“I don’t see how you could.”
“I guess it just happened.”
“When?”
“When did I decide I liked you? That day at Annie’s when you found out I was smart.”
“And you found out I was old.”
“Don’t remind me. I still haven’t recovered from that. Maybe we could say the DMV made a mistake on your license.”
She ignored the hopeful glimmer in his eyes. “How could you have decided you liked me that day? We had a terrible fight.”
“Beats me. It just happened.”
She considered what he was revealing. Nothing could be farther from a declaration of love, but his words did show a certain warmth of feeling. “I’ll need to think about it.”
“About what?”
“Whether or not I’m going to get naked.”
“All right.”
That was another thing she liked about him. For all his bullying and bluster, he knew how to distinguish what was important from the trivial, and he seemed to understand he couldn’t hurry her on this.
“There’s one more thing we have to settle.”
She regarded him warily, then sighed. “I like my car. It has personality.”
“So do a lot of psychopaths, but that doesn’t mean you want one in your house. Now here’s the way it’s going to be—”
“Cal, please don’t waste your breath giving me one of your high-handed lectures because I’ll only end up locking you out of the house again. I asked you to help me find a car, you refused, so I did it myself. The car stays. And it won’t even hurt your reputation. Think about it. When people see me driving around in it, they’ll take it as one more sign of how unworthy I am to be your wife.”
“You’ve got a point there. Everybody who knows me knows I wouldn’t be keeping any woman around for very long who drove a heap like that.”
“I won’t even comment on what that says about your sense of values.” He had a wonderful sense of values. It was his taste in women that needed an overhaul.
He grinned, but she refused to let it affect her. She wouldn’t be so easily won over. “I want your word of honor that you won’t touch my car. No driving it away or sending a tow truck when I’m not looking. The car is mine, and it stays. And just so we understand each other, I’m telling you right now that if you lay a finger on my Escort, you’ll never enjoy another box of Lucky Charms in this house.”